43.060 - Will the Truth Set Us Free? Queer, Trans, and Youth of Color Challenging Essentialism

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

As North American leaders seem to blur distinctions between fact and fiction, some scholars have responded by asserting the value of empiricism to reveal a singular truth. Research with queer, trans, and gender nonconforming (GNC) youth and youth of color often interprets empiricism differently, examining experience to challenge essential truths and their political value. Trans studies scholars have shown how efforts to quantify trans and GNC people reenact forms of gender policing (Nicolazzo, 2016, p. 22), and how methods used to determine transgender legal rights can actually limit trans peoples’ access to material resources (Spade, 2011). This symposium presents scholarship that complicates singular truths by examining experiences of queer, trans, and youth of color who transgress categories framed as stable.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Queer Studies

Chair

• Z Nicolazzo, The University of Arizona

Papers

• Methodology That Invites Liminality in Research With Gender-Nonconforming Youth - LJ Slovin, The University of British Columbia

• Policy as Pedagogy: Defining and Confining Trans Life in Schools - Harper Keenan, Stanford University

• Decolonial Pedagogies With Youth: Queer and Trans Identities in Immigrant Communities - Mauro Sifuentes, University of San Francisco

• Advocacy as Pedagogy: What Happens When We Lie? - Kyle M. Halle-Erby

• Accounting for the Lives of Homeless Queer and Trans Youth: Moving and Reading Alongside Methodology - Sam Stiegler, Colgate University